Category Archives: Immigration

At times it seems we live on such a political and cultural emotional
roller-coaster that we need to keep our seat belt securely fastened at
all times. Maybe we should spend more time reflecting on the “ride”
itself, rather than the proximate causes of our emotional stimulation.
The past few months give us a good representative sample.

In mid-January, we had the heart-wrenching image of the deportation
of an undocumented 39-year-old Latino man, Jorge Garcia, who has spent
more than 30 years in the United States, paying taxes and working for
many years to normalize his immigration status. Video crews took footage
of Mr. Garcia hugging his tearful wife, 15-year-old daughter and
12-year-old son before the father boarded a plane to return to Mexico.
The United States government sent him back to a nation he left at age
ten because some Americans consider the landscaper a national security
threat or they just want to score cheap political points. (Jorge Garcia And His Family Speak Out About His Deportation To Mexico | The View.)
A few weeks earlier, Congress passed a tax bill, which according to the
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on
Taxation, will seriously hurt the poorest working citizens of our
nation, although you have to look pretty close to see the heartless
elements contained in the legislation. The real pain to the more
economically disadvantaged will kick into implementation between 2019
and 2027. Several weeks prior to the tax bill, the nation attended to
the outcome of the Alabama election that put Doug Jones in the U.S.
Senate. Jones beat the alleged serial child molester, Roy Moore, but
only by 20,000 votes. And, of course, while all of this has been
happening the #MeToMovement has provided a constant backdrop to every
news cycle, the unending reports of powerful men systemically harassing,
assaulting and/or degrading women (and also some men) in a variety of
professions over decades.

If the airport video of the Garcia family, the details of the tax
bill, the Senate race in Alabama, and the abuse of power that has
belittled an entire gender doesn’t stir empathy, concern, and anger
about the values that seem to now drive our society, we are all in need
of a heart transplant. Or, maybe we need more esoteric surgery.

During the Alabama Senate race, many news outlets speculated about
whether the election signaled the Republican Party’s loss of its
metaphorical “soul.” It may seem a strange word for our more secular
times. But, the United States did grow out of the soil of once almost
universally embraced religious concepts, values, and principles, and the
concept of soul belongs to that legacy. It is still part of our public
lexicon, although people use it in different ways than the Founders
would have used it. Originally, the notion of a “human soul,” relying on
Greek philosophy and centuries of religious thinking, provided a
densely meaningful concept that provided a kind of foundational
background belief for the democratic principles and processes that set
the U.S. in motion. The rights assigned to human dignity enshrined in
the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence (and international human
rights law, for that matter) come, in part, from this ancient
conceptual framework. But, if soul sounds too religious for our
contemporary ears, Merriam Webster offers a more sanitized definition.
Soul is the “animating principle, or actuating cause,” and the “moral
and emotional nature of human beings.”

Whether you use the Merriam-Webster definition, or something more
sophisticated and historically dense, more and more of us are
recognizing that we stand on the precipice of losing something critical
in our culture. Maybe “soul” captures the nuances of exactly what we are
in danger of losing.

For several decades, some observers have tried to sound an alarm that
the US has declining indicators in important virtues and values that
are essential to a democratic way of life, such as character, honesty,
integrity, compassion, ethics and basic decency. While the Grand Old
Party (GOP) may show the most troubling patterns of “losing its soul”
right now — the entire nation is demonstrating serious signs of peril.
There are scores of data points for this, but a simple exercise
demonstrates it. In the final hours of the Jones-Moore vote count, USA Today ran an editorial entitled, “Will Trump’s Lows Ever Hit Bottom?”
The newspaper wrote the op-ed as a response to the president’s
degrading comments about some observations about gender issues made by
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. The troubling nature of our times
and the extent of our erosion in our trust in each other is that people
are asking the same question of leaders in virtually all sectors of our
society. At times, it appears we are having a difficult time as a nation
reaching the cellar of our own potential for narrow-mindedness,
self-absorption with our own issues, the worst of tribalism,
selfishness, and the entertainment of the lower angels of our nature at
the expense of our higher.

From demonstrations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination to
racial and ethnic prejudice; from the countless signs of increasingly
inappropriate behaviors to proposed or enacted legislation that directly
or indirectly increases human suffering, from society’s incremental
abandonment of its responsibility for citizens to childish antics and
peevish behaviors by supposed professionals, we are losing something
fundamental and foundational. We are losing the core of who we have been
and who we say we are. We are in danger of losing the soul of our
nation. Religion clearly carries some of the blame, but it also provides
part of the solution.

Going into the Jones-Moore election, considerable attention was given
to religion, but only one part of it: the white Christian evangelical
vote. In the end, it is disturbing that eight in ten evangelicals voted
for Moore. No one was more disillusioned that Mark Galli, the
editor-in-chief of the flagship evangelical magazine, Christianity Today.
Galli believes this level of Christian support will have a disastrous
effect on the evangelical brand, and also on the reputation of American
Christianity. “No one will believe a word we (Christians) say, perhaps
for a generation,” Galli said. “Christianity’s integrity is severely
tarnished.” (The Biggest Loser in the Alabama Election | Christianity Today) Much of our secular-oriented media would agree, but their perspective and even Galli’s observations are only half the story.

Alabama is a state awash in religious values and motivation, often
conflicting ones. According to the 2017 Pew Religious Landscape Study,
90% of the Alabama population considers religion an important force in
their life, 84% attend religious services and pray regularly, and 50%
identify religion a primary source of guidance on right and wrong. Most
news outlets identified the black vote as making the decisive difference
in the Jones victory. Journalists pivoted from the looking at the
situation as a religiously defined one to an election determined by
racial demographics. What has been missed by almost everyone is the deep
religious values and motivation driving many Alabaman African-American
voters to the polls, especially the decisive black female vote, with 98%
choosing Jones. Most of these women are the spiritual bedrock of faith
communities all over the state, just as they had been in the 1920s
through the 1940s when they were raising children and forming young
adults to believe in a different kind of America and a different kind of
God than was preached in many of the churches of their era. In the
birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “dream” for a different kind of
nation, which launched the civil rights movement, African-American
Christians helped their state avoid a national train wreck by bringing
soul to the polls. The mainstream media and Galli is correct. Christians
almost put a fatally flawed candidate like Moore in the U.S. Senate.
But, what has been missed is that people of faith also tipped the scale
so he did not. This election was a battle of soul.

For most of its history, Americans have reenergized the moral and
actuating fiber of their “souls” through the thoughtful reflections,
shared life of community, and strategic social activism flowing from the
wisdom of ancient religious traditions, most notably Christianity. In
the 1970s traditional spiritual sources for rejuvenating the soul
fragmented into what Charles Taylor has called the “nova effect,”
legitimizing many other spiritual sources and voices. Although
traditionally privileged religious traditions, once again particularly
Christianity, are still reeling from losing their position of influence,
this fragmentation is a good thing for a democracy — it brings into
broader focus the diversity of our understanding of and encounter with
the depths of human meaning, longing, motivation, and purpose that is
contained in practical side of a concept like soul. We can now think
about soul not only through the lens of one tradition, but in a way more
reflective of the real world and the real people living in it. The
School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University has been aware of
these cultural shifts for more than two decades, finding ways to help
future religious and spiritual leaders remain distinctively grounded in
their own historical tradition, while also contributing their
imaginations to a nation attempting to find and understand its soul in
the new context of many religious voices seeking to build a better
common life. It is no easy task building an educational curriculum with
this goal, although it clearly requires coursework and a student ethos
that is ecumenical and interreligious, intergenerational and
interdisciplinary, and oriented to action both within religious
communities and the broader world.

The United States has undergone a Star Wars epic-like struggle to achieve and maintain its character and integrity in every generation. But, we will not ultimately eradicate the lower angels of our nature through decision-making in a voting booth, as the political parties would like us to believe, and especially not in rapidly decided legislation in Congress. It is going to take a re-engagement and embrace of “soul,” even though many of us aren’t exactly sure what that means anymore. As a society, we should heed the ancient warning of those who pursue wealth, fame and power, without thinking about the collateral costs: “What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose her or his soul?” (Mark 8:36)

Humans have an obsessive need for story-telling. We tell stories because they help us see patterns in human behavior and the world around us, and the patterns make life seem less random and chaotic. Stories position us in our history; they make us aware of a higher order, an organization, and a meaning to our experiences, especially the disrupting ones, than those experiences often feel. The world can spin in dysfunction and chaos around me, but my go-to stories help me keep my center. Contrary to the preferences of some of us who like charts, graphs, and data tables, stories are the most powerful way to change someone’s mind.

This reality seems to run against the grain of our data-driven Information Age. But, as science writer Jeremy Hsu notes, 65% of our conversations still deal with stories and gossip. We not only want to tell stories; we need to tell stories, all kinds of them, and one of the more powerful forms is the autobiography. Throughout history, autobiographies have inspired the dreams of readers, fueled their public awareness of issues, and shaped their values, virtues, ideals and social, political and religious commitments. One of the most remarkable moral conversion resources in U.S. history has been the autobiography. Personal stories have saved our national soul (and personal souls) more than once.

Some of the influential autobiographies impacting the thinking of people over the last 50 years have been Anne Frank’s, The Diary of a Young Girl; Mahatma Gandhi’s, My Experiment with Truth; Maya Angelou’s, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Nelson Mandela’s, Long Walk to Freedom; Golda Meir’s, My Life; Malcolm X’s, The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told by Alex Haley; Barack Obama’s, Dreams from My Father; and, Malala Yousafzai’s, I Am Malala. Because of these autobiographies, many of us think differently about adolescent development, social action in the world, the African-American experience in the U.S., the human cost involved in toppling an oppressive regime; and, the leadership challenges and opportunities faced by Jewish and Muslim women.

Last year, as part of its pilot of a new Search for Meaning Empowerment Series, the School of Theology and Ministry invited three people to talk about their autobiographies: former director of the FBI, James Comey; former Secretary of State John Kerry; and Khizr Khan, a Pakistani immigrant and Gold Star father who lost his son, Captain Humayun Khan, to a 2004 car bombing in Iraq, and challenged Donald Trump in a speech at the 2016 Democratic Convention to borrow his (Kahn’s) copy of the U.S. Constitution and read it.

Autobiographies allow the reader to see the world from an entirely different perspective, and to begin to think and feel from another person’s perspective. Social psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock call this phenomenon “narrative transportation.” A reader’s belief system and judgments in the real world can change based on the “transport” experience of a story. The phenomenon works for fiction, too, but autobiographies offer a particular kind of influence. They are based on real stories and real people.

Many believe St. Augustine of Hippo’s, Confessions, published in 400 CE, was the first autobiography in Western culture. The text tells the story of the author’s self-indulgent and self-destructive search for happiness, ultimate meaning, and purpose in his youth, and his ultimate conversion to Christianity. As Augustine wrote in one of his book’s most quoted passages:

“O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! … You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness: You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in a breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

There has been a lot of speculation as to why Augustine wrote his Confessions. Few scholars believe that he wrote it to convert others. But, his text has opened many readers through the centuries to a spiritual reality that they only accessed the first time through the narrative transportation they experienced in reading Confessions. In a similar way, the 1948 autobiography of the famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, deeply impacted post-World War II readers, particularly those who had encountered the carnage of battle and technologically-enhanced destruction. They experienced the expansion of their search for meaning, purpose, and belief in something bigger than themselves by walking imaginatively through the experiences of Merton.

In a very real way, story-telling allows us to plant ideas and experiences into someone else’s brain through the empathetic connection the reader makes with the writer or characters in a story. A well-written autobiography puts us in someone else’s skin. It allows us to see the world from their perspective and can awaken us to the same kinds of intellectual, emotional and spiritual transformations described by the author.

Since we have just completed Black History Month, it is worth mentioning that one of the most influential autobiographies in U.S. history is The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Douglass was born into slavery and escaped to the north at the age of 20. While attending an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket in August of 1841, he felt the compulsion to address a mostly white crowd, and the famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, heard the impromptu speech. Afterward, Garrison convinced Douglass to write an autobiography and to become a storied symbol of the evil of American slavery.

Douglass’s book provides graphic descriptions of torture, the emotional and physical mistreatment of fellow slaves, and his own first awakenings of a desire for true freedom. But, the power of Douglass’s narrative is that it is mostly about the simple things experienced by a man living under the horrid situation of slavery. He explains the smells, sights, tastes and sounds of a slave in the antebellum south, and the feelings these sensations created inside him of fear, sorrow, loss, and anger, as well as the emerging dreams of adequate food and warmth and clothing, and a sense of safety and security that birthed a burning desire for freedom. The Douglass autobiography created an empathy bridge for its more than 30,000 readers prior to the Civil War. It became a powerful source of motivation for American abolitionists, opening their eyes to the urgency of the nation’s need to end the evils of slavery.

As the United States continues to debate the issue of immigration, another autobiography is now attempting to awaken the American conscience the same way Douglass did in pre-Civil War America. Jose Antonio Vargas, a Filipino immigrant, wrote, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, in order to explain what it felt like to hide his undocumented status for 18 years while living in the United States, attending middle school, high school, college, and launching a journalism career. Vargas explains how he worked around educational and legal systems by relying on his own wits and the counsel of an assortment of mostly white Americans who cared for him and offered their assistance.

The author believes his book is not so much about the complexities of the American immigration system as it is about “homelessness” and the “unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in.” The stories in the book are about the need for many undocumented immigrants to build an identity and life on lies, and the toll this takes on immigrants, their families, and those who care for the women and men caught in the purgatory between legal and undocumented status.

In 2011, Vargas decided to expose his immigration status through an autobiographical article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

This article later led to his autobiography, which he dedicated to the world’s 258 million migrants. Three years after the publication of the book, while attending a vigil for Central American migrants in a border town in Texas, Vargas was arrested for lack of proper documentation and was placed in detention. His incarceration became an international news story. In his cell, he realized a disturbing truth about the way the U.S. treats its migrants.

“Inside the cell, I concluded that none of this was an accident … waving a ‘Keep Out!’ flag at the Mexican border while holding up a Help Wanted sign a hundred yards in (to the nation’s border) – is deliberate. Spending billions building fences and walls, locking people up like livestock, deporting people to keep the people we don’t want out, tearing families apart, breaking spirits – all of that serves a purpose.”

The American immigration system is designed, wittingly or unwittingly, to create misery in the lives of millions of innocent human beings, so that they can serve the employment needs of several industries relying on cheap labor. “Dear America,” Vargas concludes the book in the best of the autobiographical tradition, “is this really whom we want to be?

As humans, we have a million ways to hide the truth of our complicity in evil. We are busy. We don’t really know the details. We are victims of the system. Some of our greatest moral issues are also papered over in state-sanctioned inaccurate information, if not downright lies. There is no greater example of this than the immigration issue.

Vargas has used his newfound fame to highlight the role of the immigrant. After moving from an invisible to a visible story-teller in American society on the issue of immigration, he used his resources to found: Define American, a multi-media story-telling organization that attempts to redefine the way Americans think about the people who come to the U.S. for all kinds of reasons, but without the proper documentation. We will see if Vargas changes America’s attitudes about immigration, the way Frederick Douglass did about slavery.

But, regardless of the conclusion of the Vargas effort, autobiographies will continue to wield power. The kind of power to save our souls.